D
droid
Guest
John Eden sent me a pamphlet... Ive already said too much.
and it is without any doubts a straight up racist and propagandist movie which subtly yet certainly furthers US pro-war ideology through heroicizing US soldiers and inhumanizing Iraqis
al-Qa'eda's ideology may have been influenced by Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune. The latter does actually make some sense, what with all the millennial prophecy and messianic jihadi fervour.
jesus christ you are such a vindictive petty little man. and no amount of time spent on typing "well researched and articulated arguments" will ever change that.I stick by all of what i said two years ago. it's only a propagandist film to those for whom every film on the war must be, ironically, a piece of propaganda that adheres to their POV. if this was 1986 you'd be saying Platoon subtly furthered the cause of U.S. imperialism by failing to have someone stand on a table + shout "VIETNAM WAR BAD" for two straight hours. James ain't no hero nor anti-hero, he's just an asshole adrenaline junkie. go look at any reaction to the movie by actual Iraq War veterans (American ones, which should be clear, but I'm sure someone would say something if I didn't) and, positive or negative (there are both) + that's their unanimous opinion of him. the attempt to fix him in the square jaw JW/Rambo/whatever lineage is frankly, bullshit. + no it's not perfectly, or even well, balanced but it doesn't purport to be + since when was that a requirement for any kind of art and...you know what, fuck it. I reckon you won't be able to say anything Gavin didn't already say ten times better, but feel free to pick up where he left off + actually say something instead of just tossing buzzwords around.
($10,000 says if Werner Herzog - or Oliver Stone or whoever - had directed the same movie, literally shot for shot, you would be standing up + cheering it as a brilliant indictment of U.S imperialism)
jesus christ you are such
On the other hand, Zhao is alright with ideological brain-washing, terrorism and crimes against humanity when perpetrated by German Marxist-Leninists.
I read that. How could that happen?"The Pakistani characters were speaking Arabic? That's hysterical."
What emerges is a portrait of modern warfare as an elaborate technocracy. Torture, surveillance, and enemy action are all treated as data, which is then used to calculate probabilities. These probabilities form the bases for future actions, which yield more data. The cycle goes on and on and on.
Within Zero Dark Thirty's mise en scène, monitors and live video feeds become interchangeable with their real-world subjects. People become tracking device blips, shapes glimpsed through the spy planes, photos pasted on dry erase boards. Late in the film, Maya stands in the CIA's Predator control center, gazing at a wall-sized screen; in front of her is the ultimate expression of technocratic warfare—live video of a drone strike.
...an apparent inability to distinguish a work of fiction from journalism...